In this book, Daniel Albright, one of today's most intrepid and vividly communicative explorers of the border territory between literature and music, offers insights into how composers of genius can help us to understand Shakespeare. Musicking Shakespeare demonstrates how four composers -- Purcell, Berlioz, Verdi, and Britten -- respond to the distinctive features of Shakespeare's plays: their unwieldiness, their refusal to fit into interpretive boxes, their ranting quality, their arbitrary bursts of gorgeousness. The four composers break the normal forms of opera -- of music altogether -- in order to come to terms with the challenges that Shakespeare presents to the music dramatist. Musicking Shakespeare begins with an analysis of Shakespeare's play The Tempest as an imaginary Jacobean opera and as a real Restoration opera. It then discusses works that respond with wit and sophistication to Shakespeare's irony, obscurity, contortion, and heft: Berlioz's Rom?©o et Juliette, Verdi's Macbeth, Purcell's The Fairy Queen, and Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream. These works are problematic in the ways that Shakespeare's plays are problematic. Shakespeare's favorite dramatic device is to juxtapose two kinds of theatres within a single play, such as the formal masque and the loose Elizabethan stage. The four composers studied here respond to this aspect of Shakespeare's art by going beyond the comfort zone of the operatic medium. The music dramas they devise call opera into question.
Author(s): Daniel Albright
Year: 2007
Language: English
Pages: 332
CONTENTS
......Page 6
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
......Page 8
INTRODUCTION
......Page 12
Part 1: Romeo and Juliet......Page 42
Introduction to Part 1......Page 44
1. The Veronese Social Code......Page 46
2. The Code of Love......Page 56
3. Love against Language......Page 66
4. The Afterlife of Romeo and Juliet......Page 74
5. La lance branlée: French Opinions of Shakespeare......Page 80
6. Berlioz in the Plural......Page 85
7. Roméo et Juliette: Introduction......Page 91
8. Roméo et Juliette: The Symphony......Page 102
9. Roméo et Juliette: The Opera Resumes......Page 118
Part 2: Macbeth......Page 126
10. Shakespeare’s Random......Page 128
11. Magic as Theft......Page 132
12. Prophesying......Page 134
13. Squinting at Consequences......Page 137
14. Macbeth’s Children......Page 140
15. Macbeth as an Actor......Page 144
16. Two Theatres......Page 148
17. Witches Amok......Page 153
18. Sortileges of Speech......Page 172
19. Lady Macbeth as Witch......Page 178
20. Time Slips......Page 187
21. La Sonnambula......Page 193
Part 3: A Midsummer Night’s Dream......Page 204
22. Cosmicomedy......Page 206
23. The Picture of Cupid......Page 216
24. Depictorializing Cupid......Page 221
25. Cupid’s Wax......Page 225
26. The Tedious Brief Scene......Page 232
27. Other Dreams in Other Summers: The Aesthetic of the Masque......Page 244
28. Purcell’s The Fairy Queen......Page 251
29. Lampe’s Pyramus and Thisbe......Page 268
30. Experimenters: Mendelssohn and Korngold......Page 273
31. Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream......Page 276
NOTES
......Page 308
BIBLIOGRAPHY
......Page 318
INDEX
......Page 322
